


Cold

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-22
Updated: 2004-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1627256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Lady Amalthea withers in King Haggard's castle. Prose meditation on freedom and change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Luna

 

 

King Haggard's castle, a witch sculpture of molten rock and insanity, poises on   
the brink. Nothing rests at night, as if the constant motion of the tide prevents   
people from putting down roots, even in sleep. The castle itself has moved   
slowly over the past hundred years. One more half step and it will throw itself   
over the cliff and into the sea, an act of inanimate suicide.

The Lady Amalthea does not sleep well at night. There is a path she walks in half-  
dreams, footfalls echoing in snowy darkness. She moves over cobblestone   
bridges and past meadows where snow has surprised a newborn spring. Ice   
covered bluebells ring as relentless wind passes through. The butterfly is   
crystalline and his wings hurt to look at. His voice is like saws as he says to her,   
"You passed by me long ago. The Red Bull covers your footsteps. You are lost,   
and cannot go home. Your house is on fire, your children alone. You name is a   
red mark on my wall, I would give anything to forget your name."

Once she woke in the night with Lír sitting at the foot of her bed, stone   
still and staring. She screamed and jumped up, slamming into a corner of her   
room. He approached her like a wild animal, but he was blind and did not   
remember that wild animals trapped in corners are the most dangerous of all.   
The Lady Amalthea crashed into him and wrestled him to the ground, scratching   
harpy claws down his face until blood bloomed on his white night shirt and tears   
fell like acid as they coursed down his cheeks. He accepted it, and laid her into   
bed when her eyes rolled back and she knew no more. When Molly raised an   
eyebrow at his bandages the next day he shrugged and said that he was just   
trying to slay all of the dragons.

There are paths that lead through mountains in her dreams. There are   
mountains where white flowers bloom as pure as anything she has ever seen.   
She watches them crumble and burst into flame, or rot into stagnant pools of   
fleshy petal and swamp stench. Everywhere she walks, there is death.

Somewhere in a land of islands and oceans the harpy Celaeno catches an updraft   
and wheels away. The constant gnawing in her belly reminds her of the witch, as   
if the old woman's sand tears have coalesced to form a painful hourglass sifting   
through the harpy's borrowed time. Celaeno had known in her bones that she   
would be free one day. She did not know that she would carry her chains with   
her, that it is not revenge but remembrance that holds the higher price. She scans   
the land and lazily wonders about her little sister, trapped in her own   
naïveté, and before her mind is swept away again by pain and   
undigested screams she smiles a little in knowing that she is not the only one   
thus blessed. How she would have laughed to learn about the unicorn's shackles   
of flesh.

Flesh bears witness and is not easily forgotten. The unicorn inside the Lady sees   
this lesson before it is thrust upon her. The Lady's dreams are merely horrors   
her waking mind does not know how to process. Foresight is hidden deeper,   
and if it wasn't she would never sleep. Though skulls dozing on shelves would   
tell her that half-death is worse than anything life can bring. And an old hag deep   
in the belly of the beast will cackle and say that when you love you are never   
free.

Perhaps it is that she is always tired. This is what she thinks when the tall pale   
man presents her with glasses of poetry and bouquets of dragon's heads. Maybe   
it's the endless cold the sea gales bring, buffeting against her skin until she wraps   
herself in tapestry and fur to keep the wind out. Sometimes the mark on her   
forehead burns. If you've ever closed your eyes and slowly moved the point of a   
knife toward the space between them you know how it feels. A twanging itch   
that nothing can heal.

The magician loses hope but is still smug; he says there are no happy endings but   
keeps one in line for himself. The humbler man who juggled oranges avoids the   
lady that he made. He does not doubt that he can turn her back, but he knows   
that he can never make her real again. Molly peels potatoes and when she   
forgets to pay attention and they burn into small coals on the stove, it is because   
she is deep in battle with herself, pretending that she does not hate him. He took   
her brightness away, and some losses are irreparable. Women and cats and   
skulls on shelves always know, and harpies drifting over oceans.

When the skull lets them pass it is not out of pity or boredom or even the desire   
for a dram of wine. It is simply the potential of a final request left unanswered by   
rushing feet as humans, particularly incompetently immortal ones, never stop to   
think. Haggard does not thank the skull as he runs past. Even when the castle   
falls into the sea the skull will feel fish and weeds tickling and making their   
homes in it. The harpy would laugh to know of this as well.

The Lady Amalthea is used to being cold. The caverns beneath the castle are   
damp and dark. It fills her bones until her body becomes a cathedral of brilliant   
white ruin. Lír attempts to touch her, but it is finished, broken. She has   
already changed, before the Bull and the magician appear on stage. She is not   
woman or unicorn but grey clouds, the pearly underside of waves, blankness a   
step sideways from being. He thought he could never know her, but now there   
is no her at all. Still he says he loves whom he loves, and follows the path of fire   
laid out for him.

The sea calls to her. The sea calls with an end to despair and dreams and drab   
fecundity. But in the place where unicorn and lady meet there is a stirring, a   
border crossing, and a voice that is neither of theirs says, "If I cannot love, let   
them love. Let there be unicorns again, though I know them not, even if it   
means that he will hunt them down and drive them back into the sea." The Red   
Bull steps into the water and as they flow out, like a dam finally breached, the   
unicorn feels a clarion bell ringing in her heart. She forgets the woman and the   
magician and the boy until they pass, filling in the cracks left by their leaving,   
reviving lilac bushes that have long stood withered.

She remembers, then. She has no new dreams but the old ones never leave her,   
and a Lady hides inside with scratches down her arms and a voice that only   
keens in wordless sorrow. She wanders as the magician fears, down long and   
crooked roads, and now she is lonely as well as alone.

 


End file.
